Rogue Male

It's been a month since I've written and there are absolutely no excuses! None! I shall strive to do better.

But at least the title of this post should intrigue. Several weeks ago Turner Classic Movies showed a movie entitled Man Hunt, a 1942 (?) movie about a big game hunter out to bag the prize of a lifetime, a dictator. He's captured, tortured, left for dead, etc, escapes and becomes the hunted rather than the hunter, literally going underground to survive.

And a light went off: I'd read this book! But not, like recently, or even as an adult. In junior high. Before I really understood it. But I remembered the underground bit and being hunted.

Where did I get this and what was my mother thinking to let me have it?

For starters, it wouldn't have come from the junior high library. Or the public one probably since I don't think I haunted the thriller shelves. No, I would have picked it up at my favorite bookstand: Woolworth's. I found all sorts of unsavory reading there, unsavory for a 12 year old. Gee, I wish I'd kept a few of those.

As to my mother, censorship never entered our reading vocabulary. I don't recall she ever looked at what book was clutched in my hand. Lots of times, it would be the Reader's Digest Condensed. Again, I probably didn't understand a lot of it. She'd hand me articles from her True Story, et al, magazines so I could learn lessons about pregnancy and being a teenage mother and how bad that was. Not that I was interested in joining that side of things in the '60s, but it was a word to the wise. Other than that, I was on my own.

Reading large before puberty. Think that's what makes a romance author?